The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Inkjet and laser print devices are prevalent in many home and office environments. Print devices employing inkjet or laser technology allow users to produce a wide range of printed media, from black and white documents to color photographs, conveniently and quickly on-site. Application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) are typically employed in inkjet or laser printing devices to keep costs low while providing users with a diverse set of printing features. ASICs can be employed for printing devices using any one of a number of marking technologies, so the general term printing device will be used in further descriptions.
A system-level ASIC of a printing device is typically configured to interface with a specific set of analog ASICs and other support chips, which work in concert to perform various print functions. Analog ASICs and/or support chips made by different manufactures use different interfaces, or communication protocols, which are hard-coded into the system-level ASIC's limited memory. Hard-coding limits the number of analog ASICs and/or support chips with which the system-level ASIC can communicate with, as the hard-coded communication interfaces are not flexible enough to implement different or new communication protocols. As product life cycles for printing devices are short, significant time and resources are consumed hard-coding system-level ASICs that can only be implemented in a limited set of products.